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Not that useful for common user who wants a pre-built kernel though. For them almost everything is modularized and loaded either via initrd or on boot. Thus pretty much everything is compiled. They're just not compiled into the kernel.

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Yeah it might sounds useful but to me a fulling working distro with vanilla kernel and doing what it is supposed to do, with no crashing and no major usability issues is what I really want, unfortunately non of current distros does that.

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This is the best resource around users looking for some mostly reliable information on kernel configuration, along with config files with sane defaults. Much thanks to him for his efforts.

As far as the idea of building a kernel based upon a benchmark - this sounds like a bad idea. Most kernel options aren't exactly "tunables" that you select in the interest of performance. You mostly enable support for the the features you need and the hardware you have. A benchmark isn't going to indicate that.

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Would it be possible to create a utility that looks at the output of lspci and lsusb and creates a simple cut down kernel config with only the bare minimum required switched on?

I think I saw something that did that. It would look at the running modules rather than at the output of lspci, but I can't remember what, where or how (perhaps I'm imagining it). To quickly find the device drivers from the device ids you could use http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/

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Yeah it might sounds useful but to me a fulling working distro with vanilla kernel and doing what it is supposed to do, with no crashing and no major usability issues is what I really want, unfortunately non of current distros does that.

Same, really. I do compile my own kernels too. But that's mostly because I pull from the development git trees. Otherwise I wouldn't really bother, Fedora has new enough kernels. :3

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This is not necessarily true.
I run Gentoo on my main machine since 2006.
and various binary distros on HTPC, laptops and of course two computers at my parents home.
I had enough problems from each to say that Gentoo saves time in long run for me.
All various incompatibility issues and wait 6 month or more to the next distro release or compile it yourself or use broken PPA (comunity for SuSe and whatever) caused me to spend much more time to maintain those Ubuntu/OpenSuse. Even Sabayon almost in the black list.
So if you want the latest and greatest and don't want to reinstall your OS, I found Gentoo the most flexible, customizable and faster OS.
And compilation time isn't issue anymore. They are short enough on my two years old C2Q + 8GB RAM. Mostly they comparable to binary installation.

Back to the topic. My .config probably started on 2.4.x
it is reviewed and updated when:

New hardware installed

New kernel released with relevant (to my system) changes

I just like to keep it as small and simple as possible.
But this might help to find how to make it even faster
Thanks Michael, you are doing great job. I hope that it will reach the point where it can be used for "real life" benchmarks and not only compare the results with other machines.
Like the HD playback. It meaningless with current files and you can not conclude if some system will or will not be able to playback blue ray movie based on this tests.

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Same findings here. I can setup a full Gentoo desktop in a quarter the time it takes to beat Ubuntu into installing the required developer libraries. It is seriously a pain. And don't say apt-get build-dependencies, since that still doesn't install half the stuff I use.

Gentoo is not for those that want the latest and greatest, it is for those that want a continuously upgrading system, where I can choose to have a small part run the latest & greatest. E.g. only when you NEED a bleeding edge version of PERL, for some new feature, you then mark PERL as "run at latest unstable" and the rest of your system is perfectly stable.

I don't really care about the performance, but I don't want to waste a week getting my notebook's audio working again after upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 (like half my office did) (And do that twice a year would drive me round the bend)

Although, I install Ubuntu for my parents system, since they don't really demand much of it, and I think they appreciate the extra polish :-)